LOCUM ON THE LOOSE
Adventures in the Australian Bush
by Jane Stevenson
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Copyright 2012 Jane Stevenson
Also written by Jane Stevenson at Smashwords.com:
Get Well and Stay Well-
How to Get Yourself Looking Good and Feeling Great, the Natural Way!
Both books are available in paperback form at most online retailers.
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Water.... Keeping the Outback Alive
Adventure in the Southern Highlands
~~~~~~~~~~
There came a time in my life when I really didn’t want to keep doing what I had been doing for years: working away in Sydney pharmacies, churning out prescriptions, listening to the aches and pains and generally not very enthused with the whole business.
My children had grown up and were off doing their own thing and I felt a bit bored just hanging about working and not doing very much else ..... certainly nothing that filled me with excitement and made me look forward to each new day.
I longed to lash out and do something completely different but pharmacy was a good job, the pay was reasonably good and I had no worries once I left for the night. Nor was I tied to any particular pharmacy ... I was free to leave any time I wanted. What could I do?
From time to time I had tried a few other things. At one time I had worked in the corporate scene with the power-dressing and the stiletto heels but I really couldn’t be bothered gearing myself up to do it all again. The corporate scene is exciting but it can also be pretty soul-destroying; it takes a hundred and ten percent of your energy just to keep your head above water. I didn’t want to go back into that field of work.
I remembered that when the children were little I used to think it must be possible to work one’s way around the country doing locums, though I didn’t know anyone who had done it. It must be possible, the children have all grown up ........ go for it!
I wrote a letter to every pharmacy in rural New South Wales offering my services and was delighted to receive several replies with offers of work. I ended up doing locums for the next six years, many of them being repeat locums for the people who answered my initial letter.
What fun! Finish in one town Saturday lunchtime, drive 500km or so on Saturday afternoon and Sunday and start work in the next job on Monday morning. Do that for a month or so, have a few weeks off in Sydney, and then head back for another stint in another town somewhere else.
It’s been terrific and I have had some wonderful adventures.
Sometimes just getting to the job is adventure enough as I drive 800km to get from Nowra on the south coast to Maitland on the north coast via Yass and Dubbo because Sydney is surrounded by bushfires. As I drive through rivers with my heart in my mouth near Cobar in time of flood. As I drive up a dirt road that becomes more and more like a creek-bed back of Walgett, until my nerves fail me and I have to backtrack 200km to take a different route.
I hope you will enjoy reading about some of my adventures.
~~~~~~~~~~
I drove towards my first job, a week at each of two pharmacies in Griffith, a small town in the irrigation area of southern New South Wales. I realised that I was going back into pharmacy again, back to the prescriptions, the crying babies and the computer. Would it have changed very much? It’s one thing to work one night a week, or at weekends, as I had done for the last few years .... the customers are as transient as you are yourself, usually young people getting scripts for once-only things like antibiotics. It’s another thing to work every day when most of the customers are elderly pensioners and we rush around filling scripts for nursing homes. I had forgotten how all day you are called out to the counter to talk to this one and that one about small things that are troubling them, usually too minor, in their eyes, to warrant a trip to the doctor. I remembered that pharmacy was all about people and their problems and I wondered if things had changed much in the time I had been absent on a different career.
Finding out whether things had changed or not was still in front of me as I made arrangements for my first job in the bush, away from my home in Sydney for the first time in my life ........ my job in Griffith was going to take me much further west than I had been before. I didn’t know what to expect and I was a bit apprehensive of the state of the roads ... would I even get there?
I’m sure people in the bush don’t realise that someone brought up in the city has little real awareness of what life is like beyond the Blue Mountains. I certainly had no idea, I felt I was going into the great unknown and fully expected to be lost at any minute in a vast hinterland of scattered towns and poor roads.
Life in rural N.S.W. certainly is different in some ways to life in Sydney. For one thing, the economy of the town is very much bound up with local agriculture which in turn is influenced by the weather. A good year, a bumper crop, and commerce picks up in the town with increased sales of agricultural machinery and commercial vehicles and greater spending in the local stores. A bad year, a crop failure, a drought or a flood and the town’s business takes a downturn affecting everyone who lives in the district.
The biggest surprise I had, however, was to realise that day-to-day life in a country town is not much different to that of a family living in suburban Sydney .... we shop at the same supermarket chains, we wear the same brands of clothing bought at the same fashion stores, we read the same newspapers and watch the same shows on television. I’m amazed at how similar the lifestyles are and often think that many rural towns are just like any one of Sydney’s commercial suburbs: some high-rise office buildings in the centre, some pubs and motels on the highway, a string of familiar stores along the main street, schools and hospitals and churches, and not nearly as strange and frightening as I had imagined it to be.
In the beginning I was frightened, because I had rarely been out of Sydney and I didn’t know what to expect.
Work was work, however, and work was income, so I tried to hide my apprehension, waved a bright ‘See you!’ to my family and headed out of Sydney towards the south-west.
Just south of Yass I turned right, heading inland to go through Harden and Temora, which the map showed to be the most direct route to Griffith, but immediately I found myself on a mess of a road, all potholes and twisting turns as it threaded its way through the little town of Bowning. This can’t be the way! It’s a goat track already and I’ve still got about 300 km to go!
I turned back onto the Hume Highway and continued down to Gundagai and Wagga Wagga before once more heading west for Griffith. I must have added a good two hours to the trip but at least I felt more at ease. Now, of course, I know that if I had only continued through Bowning I would have found a superb road that runs straight and true all the way to my destination, and that’s the road I now take when I go to Griffith, Australia’s answer to Venice, criss-crossed as it is by a thousand canals.
I arrived in Griffith at the end of that long hot drive and was really surprised. Bright, modern, chic and sophisticated, a ‘new’ town designed by Walter Burley Griffin, the architect who designed Canberra, and every bit as confusing to the newcomer as that extraordinary city though thankfully smaller.
I was tired after so long a trip so I headed straight for the Gemini, a modern hotel/motel in the centre of town, ‘home’ to travellers during the week, ‘home’ only to myself and a few tourists at the weekends. Except, of course, when there is a wedding in town.
Griffith is very keen on big weddings, a thousand guests at the enormous Yoogali Workers’ Club is not unusual, and people come from all around and from Sydney and Melbourne for the occasion. The bride will be fully decked out in bridal wear, she will have four or five bridesmaids, the fleet of white Fairlanes will appear from nowhere with white ribbons on the bonnet, playing musical tunes on their horns or however they do it as they do a few laps up and down Banna Ave for all to see.
Griffith is an amazing place. Italians, English, Indians, Maoris, Tongans, Scots, Aborigines, Fijians, they all mix in and rub along together, all Aussies when all is said and done. Multiculturalism is alive and well in Griffith and we could all do worse than to follow its example. I think the word ‘multiculturalism’ is unhelpful, implying separateness and division. I believe the word ‘multibackgroundism’ would be better .... all Aussies, and all proud of our various backgrounds ..... maybe then we could bury the lingering hatchets of ten, fifty or two hundred years ago and just get on with being the lucky citizens of a lucky land.
Beautiful homes with stunning gardens. The gardens are a treat because the people, especially those of Italian background, are very house-proud and all seem to have green fingers. Every front garden has roses, agapanthus, camellias, every flower you can think of, while every back garden has its patch full of flourishing vegetables. The soil is deep, red and rich, all it ever needed is water which is free because of the irrigation. What more could a gardener want?
Six am on a summer’s morning in Griffith and a thousand sprinklers start up, using water like there is no tomorrow, trying to wet the soil before the day’s forty degree heat fries everything to a crisp.
Water is not a problem in Griffith, which is at the centre of the M.I.A., the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, also known as the Riverina.
~~~~~~~~~~
The lady came in with her scripts plus a pile of scripts for her very sick husband who was a long-term diabetic.
I was dispensing them, thinking of what I was doing but nevertheless with half an ear cocked to the chatter on the counter, always more interesting than the dispensary.
‘Yes, love’, she was saying sadly to Kay, ‘he’s been took real bad just this last week so we went down and they say they have to remove his testicles’.
I couldn’t believe it. I listened harder to hear more of this development in the magical world of medicine.
‘They say that’s the only thing to fix him, but in no time he’ll be running around like new’.
I peered around the corner of the computer.
She seemed not the least concerned, considering. Blimey, she’s tough. She saw me looking her way, my face a picture of disbelief.
‘Don’t you believe me, love? You look as though you don’t believe me’.
‘Oh, well, um. It’s not that I don’t believe you,’ (the customer is always right), ‘it’s just that I haven’t heard of this treatment before. Um, it just seems a bit drastic, isn’t there anything else they can do?’
‘No, there isn’t anything else, we’ve been into that. But he’s had a good life, so if it helps if they knacker him I’ll be pleased’.
My head was spinning.
Kay looked at me, looked at her, looked back at me, consternation and the beginnings of a grin.
‘Jane, you do know that Mrs Phipps is talking about her dog, don’t you?’
I let out a shriek.
‘I thought you were talking about your husband!’
She didn’t turn a hair.
‘Oh, no, love. Gawd, that’d be the last bloody straw!’
Back to the scripts, a smile on my face, we do get our share of laughs in this job.
~~~~~~~~~~
WATER ... KEEPING THE OUTBACK ALIVE
I went to the tourist information office in Griffith and was astounded at the scope of the irrigation scheme. More than 300 km away the water leaves Burrinjuck dam near Yass and runs by the ‘main canal’ all the way to Griffith, propelled only by gravity. The ‘main canal’ in Griffith makes you think of the Grand Canal in Venice though it’s not quite like that, but nevertheless it is about twelve metres wide, about four metres deep, and the vast amount of water flows noticeably swiftly through it, gradually being dispersed to the hundreds of small farms dotted around the town. I reflect briefly upon the fact that were such an enormous scheme proposed today there would be thousands of people, and I would be one of them, screaming environmental vandalism and the project would never get off the ground. No one nowadays would think it ‘right’ that a river such as the Murrumbidgree should be dammed and its water diverted 300 km along canals to a flat plain for the purpose of intensive farming. Back in the 1920s, however, there probably was little resistance to the idea which was seen as a wonderful project by which man could bring life-giving water to the dry interior countryside, opening up the area as nothing else could have done.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme was even grander and more ambitious, entailing as it did the damming of several rivers in the Snowy Mountains, the creation of lakes such as Lake Jindabyne and Lake Eucumbene, and the pumping of their waters back over the mountains into the headwaters of the Murray River with hydroelectric power created on the way.
The Murray River, the mightiest river in Australia, has now been ‘tamed’ with weirs and dams at intervals along its length and the extent of irrigation from the Murray is astonishing. Thousands of tonnes of produce are grown every year for the domestic market and for export to markets all over the world. The irrigation water from the Murrumbidgee, the Namoi, the Macquarie, the Lachlan and the Darling, all of which eventually flow into the Murray, has transformed the economy of rural N.S.W. and provided employment and a living that the land could not have otherwise sustained.
Like many things man has dreamed up, however, the benefits have come with a huge cost that was not foreseen, probably could not have been foreseen in view of the knowledge that was available at the time. The problems are only just becoming apparent now, some fifty or more years after the projects were begun, and the problems seem insurmountable.
The extensive withdrawal of water from the rivers for irrigation has resulted in reduced water flow reaching the lower reaches of the rivers, to the extent that the lower Murray receives very little water and the extensive lake systems at the mouth of the Murray have almost dried up allowing incursion of salt sea water. Not only that, but the damming of the rivers has evened out the wildly different water levels that were once the natural state. The rivers no longer get flushed out in times of heavy flood, and no longer drain out to little more than scattered pools in the dry season. Now the rivers are more or less full most of the time and the resulting sluggish current has allowed a build-up of sediment on the river bed that has choked aquatic plant life and led to a decline in the numbers of native fish. The European carp, released long ago into the Murray, probably because it seemed a good idea at the time, has taken over so completely that the native Murray cod hardly stands a chance. Now, however, Charlie Carp might find his halcyon days are over as he becomes material for fertiliser. Let’s hope so.
The sluggish current of the now tame rivers also allows the build-up of algae which thrive in the nutrient-rich water and strong sunlight, to the point where blooms of the toxic blue-green algae in the Darling River periodically threaten the lives of any stock that might drink the water.
Before the damming of the rivers the dry season caused the water levels to fall ten metres or more, allowing the river to act as a gigantic drainage system for the surrounding land. Now, because of regular dams and weirs down the length of the rivers, the land does not get drained on a regular basis and the water level or ‘water table’ below the surface of the earth remains unnaturally high. As the water table has risen over the years it has brought with it to the surface a huge amount of soluble salts which attack the roots of trees, the structure of the roads and even, in towns like Wagga Wagga, the foundations of the buildings themselves. The increased salinity of the surface and sub-surface water has led to vast tracts of pasture and crops being destroyed and now nothing at all will grow on the land thus affected. The problem has been exacerbated by the wholesale clearing of trees which originally acted as pumps dragging the moisture down from the surface of the soil and then releasing it into the atmosphere by transpiration.
Some of the rivers are now shadows of their former selves, little more than creeks where once they were raging torrents in the spring thaw of the Snowy Mountains. The wonderful Snowy River, which rings of romance to Australian ears, now contains 1% of its original flow because it is dammed at Jindabyne and its waters, instead of rushing headlong to the east are now diverted back over the mountains to feed the western-flowing Murray. Recent action by environmental groups has led to some extra water being allowed to stay in the Snowy River, but even so it’s a far cry from the mighty watercourse it used to be.
The Macquarie River flowing from down near Yass and Canberra northwards through Dubbo now only has 20% of its original flow going into the ecosystem of the Macquarie marshes, home to millions of birds. The marshes are a fraction of their former size and the flocks of birds are smaller than they used to be. Again, recent lobbying by environmental groups has resulted in the Federal Government taking over the management of the entire Murray-Darling system with the hope of restoring things as they used to be, although it will cost billions of dollars to have any real effect.
As it is at present the Darling, the Namoi, the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee and the Murray all show damage because of our insatiable urge to ‘improve’ on nature and our determination to make the land do what we want it to.
We have created a monster. And once again we have to acknowledge that in looking after our own interests we have caused unbelievable damage to the environment on which we depend for our existence. We are already here on this earth in our hundreds of millions, but we are like termites in a tumbledown shack eating ourselves out of house and home.
What is the answer? I don’t know. I just have a mental picture of our planet looking like a dog riddled with fleas .... sooner or later there will be a frenzy of biting and scratching and we will all be flung into outer space clutching our mansions and our mobile phones as we go.
But so far, in the groovy little town of Griffith there is no sense of impending disaster. Of all the towns I have been to, apart from the Gold Coast which survives on hot air and dreams, Griffith is the one that appears to be forging ahead, where the prize goes to the person who is prepared to work the hardest. Fruit, vegetables, grapes, whatever can be grown is grown, and the roads bear the load of semi-trailers taking thousands of tonnes of produce to the markets of Sydney, Melbourne and the world. It’s big business.
The town is prosperous, with 10,000 people in the town itself, 25,000 counting the surrounding farms.
The shops are bright and modern, one of everything you find in the big city because the young girls are super fashion conscious, so much so that I feel like a frump on Saturday mornings when uniforms need not be worn and smart casual is the order of the day.
The shops, strung out along one side of Banna Ave, all face the north so in winter you can sit on the footpath at a little wrought-iron table sipping your cappuccino and eating your focaccia or your pasta or your crostoli in the warmth of the never-ending sunshine.
It’s marvellous .... a little touch of Europe in the middle of the bush.
Now, when I arrive in Griffith, I head straight for the top of Scenic Hill and sit up there looking down on the town and its surrounding farms, looking over to Lake Wyangan that at weekends is a swarm of speedboats and a flutter of sailing dinghies, over to Cocopara National Park straddling the horizon clear cut against the sky, looking closer than forty kilometres away because of the bright clean air.
They live the good life in Griffith, and they enjoy it.
~~~~~~~~~~
A weekend free in Griffith and I decided to go exploring in the surrounding countryside. I headed out of town towards Cocopara National Park, the line of almost mountains on the horizon to the north, the only green spot on the map for miles around. Half an hour and thirty kilometres out of Griffith and I had been on a dead straight dirt road for a long time. I started to feel a bit uneasy .... one day I’ll be found dead in a ditch, murdered by some long-gone fiend with no one to know what happened. I know that I must sound a bit paranoid, but this was my first trip out of a country town and into the real bush. I was scared.
I hadn’t seen a car for ages.
A plume of dust was coming towards me, visible from miles away. Oh dear, first I’m frightened because I don’t see a car, now I’m frightened because I do. What if they are Bad People? I feel like turning back but I can’t bear to be such a coward so I keep going.
The plume of dust came nearer, took the form of two bikies, black singlets, tattoos, hair streaming out behind them as they barrelled towards me on their Harley-Davidsons, hands above their heads to reach their custom-built handlebars.
I swallowed hard as they shot past me heading back to town.
I imagined them looking at each other, nudge nudge wink wink across the dirt between them, turning around and coming after me, a woman alone in her car 30km from the nearest town.
I watched them in the rear view mirror. If I saw them slow and turn, I would turn, and I would floor the car straight at them and if I hit them too bad.
But it didn’t happen; I watched as they dwindled into specks and disappeared in the distance. I bored the car up the twisting hillside of the Park, still scared but determined to see the view from the top. I confess I didn’t even see it because I didn’t even look. I hurled the car into a wheelie round the TV mast at the top of the hill and fled back to the safety of town.
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When I first went to Griffith I tried to think of things to do in my spare time. Exploring was high on the list, but first I thought it might be nice to meet a few of the people instead of just driving around on my own. I rang the Greening Australia people and went out on a Sunday morning to help with the latest planting project .... hundreds and hundreds of trees to be grown on the fifty metre wide strip either side of the main canal.
I chatted to this one and that one as we planted the tiny seedlings on little mounds with moats around them, cut holes in squares of old carpet and laid them around the tiny trees to act as mulch and keep the weeds down, and filled the moats with water from the canal using a small portable pump.
I heard how the whole area had once been pine forest and eucalypt-covered grasslands, but irrigation is so intense and expensive an undertaking that every piece of ground within reach of the canals was cleared to make way for farms. Nowadays Griffith and its surrounding area has very little natural bush, very little bird life, and only ‘bush remnants’ remain. The Greening Australia people, all volunteers, collect seeds from the bush remnants, germinate them and plant them on tracts of land either on people’s farms or alongside the main roads, railway lines and canals. They told me there was no shortage of willing hands to do the work .... for major projects they had the help of local schools and clubs such as Apex and Rotary and they blitzed acres of ground in day-long working bees. Their greatest problem was getting through the red tape to get permission to plant on land owned by the RTA, State Rail and similar government bodies. It’s understandable, the RTA would have to think twice about which land they allowed to be planted ..... in thirty years’ time they might want to widen the country road into a major highway and they’ll have thousands of conservationists protesting the loss of trees they had allowed to be planted.